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What is the best hard drive?

backblaze.com

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Re: What is the best hard drive?

#81

Post by ewams »

mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

It is just under the title at the top of the article: " What is the Best Hard Drive? January 21st, 2015 "

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#83

Post by SCdF »

rootbear wrote: post #23
atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

Agreed. FWIW I basically don't read articles where I can't find the date, unless it's clearly something that doesn't need one (which is rare). Especially anything technology related, truth turns to myth in no time at all.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#84

Post by ternaryoperator »

richardwigley wrote: post #10
atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) I appreciate, in the end you have to do what gets you the most views, however, from my perspective missing out the date means you prefer to waste my time as I have to scan the article until I get a feel for how old it is. I would read anything written within 6 months and would consider up to 12 months if the information was high quality. It's not like we're overburdened with qu…

>Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-)

It's not a euphemism. It's a standard term in web content for articles that are not time-sensitive. An article on how Quicksort works is an evergreen article. One on predictions for tomorrow's stock market moves is not.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#85

Post by ttty »

atYevP wrote: post #4
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

You could do:

- Show last update date on all posts; - The evergreen posts you just update every 3-6 months to keep them updated and still green; - The not evergreen posts can be considered not useful therefore let them be old.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#86

Post by pbhjpbhj »

RickHull wrote: post #38
dragontamer wrote: post #29

I love the data, but I'm a little mad that Hitachi had to die as a company and got sold into pieces. I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. Technically, the 3.5" drives from Hitachi got sold to Toshiba. For example, the Toshiba DT01ACA300 is allegedly the same design as the Hitachi 7k3000. In the following link, note that the "HDS723030BLE640" is the model number to the 7k3…

> I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. > I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. FTA: > Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous brand, Hitachi. We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request.

>We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request. //

Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to question the impartiality of the report.

Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in the report?

Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#87

Post by barrkel »

userbinator wrote: post #15

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?

One failure from one drive bought for me too.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#88

Post by thaumaturgy »

kw71 wrote: post #59
thaumaturgy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be mad forever at WD for pioneering the approach to distributing drive firmware & tuning parameters over both stripe 0 and the drive's on-board ROM, making board swaps impossible for small shops. But I'm really disappointed at what's happened to Seagate. I've gone from total confidence in recommending their products to actively recommending against the brand in just a couple of years, and our experiences…

In the older days some of these disks had a discrete rom for this, but recently they have been integrated into a larger chip. It seems that if you have the rework skills, you can transfer the chip with integrated memory to the new board. It's certainly gross when the spindle motor driver on one of these boards explodes. However if you take the lid off a WD drive, the head arm pivot goes out of alignment, since it is…

> However if you take the lid off a WD drive, the head arm pivot goes out of alignment, since it is secured in place by one of the lid screws.

Oh god, how did I forget about that? Yeah, the guys on hddguru had things to say about that a few years back. A few folks made some really good side money making a tool specifically for realigning the heads on those WD drives.

I used to do the very occasional DIY data recovery for people that had the need but not the money for a professional recovery. My last one was well over 5 years ago, WD and the others made it impossible for people like me to do it anymore. (We still can do recoveries on failing drives under very limited circumstances using a custom server/software we patched together.)

You really have to pay for expensive yearly training and piles of equipment to do data recoveries now.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#89

Post by penguat »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #39
chdir wrote: post #32

The winner of this post, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. Their NAS are well rated on Amazon & Newegg. Personally, I'm more concerned about the lifetime of laptop HDD (500GB range). Wonder what's the time frame around which I should swap it out (& what brand)

Given that you can get 512GB M2 SSDs now, I'd say go for that if you're worried about reliability. From what I've read, SSDs are more reliable unless you're trying very hard to wear out their endurance (on the order of 2PB according to http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... )

but there can be some interesting not-a-failure modes, I know because I suffered one and the recovery was a nightmare due to overly-protective UEFI. Fortunately, anything on my local SSD is only in cache and not to be worried about ;) (and I managed to put the UEFI in dumb mode so it wouldn't interfere)

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#90

Post by Rapzid »

rootbear wrote: post #23
atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

A thousand up-votes for you. Date of information is one of the most important contexts in IT. I can't count the times somebody has said "This says this and that about such and such", and I have to say "Yeah bro, when was that written? Oh, three years ago? What's the story now?".
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